It's the end of another year and a crowd of people whose size can only be referred to as "Shocking" and "Anxiety-inducing" will gather in midtown Manhattan to watch a ball drop as a clock counts down to midnight. (An aside: my wife and I have Leveled Up as parents and discovered you can stream the BBC on YouTube so your kid can watch it "turn midnight" and go to bed at A Reasonable Hour)
Why do people do this?
It goes back to Adolph Ochs. ACTUALLY, it goes back to Greenwich, England, where the Royal Observatory (home of "Greenwich Mean Time") dropped a ball at 1pm every day so that nearby captains could set their ship's chronometers. They still do it.
NOW it goes to Adolph Ochs. Born in Cincinnati in 1858, the son of German Jewish immigrants, Ochs grew up delivering newspapers in Knoxville, Tennessee. Adolph's father was a leader in Knoxville's small Jewish community and Adolph worked at the Knoxville Courier to supplement the family income. In the late 1870s, at 19 years old, Ochs borrowed $250 to buy a controlling interest in the Chattanooga Times where he became a leader in southern journalism.
By the 1890s the New York Times, which had been printing since 1851, had fallen on hard, uh, times. The newspapers losses were mounting thanks to the economic collapse of the Panic of 1893, and the sheer number of daily newspapers in New York City were cutting into the Times' readership. After being told that Chattanooga was the next Pittsburgh and investing a ton of money in real estate, the aforementioned depression happened and he lost almost anything. Rather than declare bankruptcy, Ochs decided to go all-in on publishing newspapers. In 1896, Ochs bought the Times for $75,000. Under Ochs' ownership/editorship, the Times' circulation rose from 9,000 to 780,000 by the 1920s.
Most newspapers of the time were openly one-sided in how they reported the news, according to their political leanings. Ochs provided a down-the-middle voice for "all the news that's fit to print," a phrase he added to the Times' masthead.
Longacre Square was once the site of William Vanderbilt's American Horse Exchange. The "Longacre Square" moniker was a nod to "Long Acre," the center of London's horse and carriage trade. John Jacob Astor made "a fortune" selling lots to hotels and other developers taking advantage of New York City's rapid expansion in the middle of the 19th century as immigration ramped up.
Ochs persuaded NYC Mayor George B. McLellan, Jr. (son of Civil War general George B. McLellan, Sr. and a mayor whose most notable act was in December 1908, when he cancelled the licenses for a new innovation in entertainment called "motion pictures," claiming that they "degrade or injure the morals of the community" and due to the fire hazard of celluloid.) to build a subway station. In 1904 Ochs moved the headquarters of the Times to Longacre Square. The Times' headquarters was a 25-story structure modeled after Giotto's campanile for the cathedral in Florence. Five stories were underground to accommodate the printing presses and the subway. At the time of its completion, it was the tallest building in the world.
On April 8, 1904 Longacre was officially renamed "Times Square" in honor of, but not due to the influence, the presence of the New York Times. Ochs said, "I am pleased to say that Times Square was named without any effort or suggestion on the part of The Times," and that the building was "the first successful effort in New York to give architectural beauty to a skyscraper."
Anyhow on December 31, 1904 Ochs had fireworks guys put on a show at One Times Square. 200,000 people were in attendance and at the stroke of midnight the sound emanating from Midtown could be heard 30 miles away, in Croton-on-Hudson. The tradition had begun.
In 1907 a ball dropped from a flag pole, the first innovation in the celebration. The ball was made of iron and wood, decorated with 100 25-watt light bulbs. It was 5' in diameter and weighed 700 pounds. It was made by Jacob Starr, founder of the company that would become Artkraft Strauss. Artkraft Strauss was responsible for many of Manhattan's iconic advertisements including the Camel Cigarettes billboard which blew smoke rings over Times Square. On December 31, 1907 waiters in hotels around Times Square were given battery-powered top hats that blinked "1908." When they "flipped their lids" at midnight, "1908" emblazoned the parapet of One Times Square.
Even though the Times moved to 229 West 43rd Street in 1913, the New Year's Eve festivities continued at One Times Square. Each year since, crowds have gathered in Times Square for the famous ball drop. For two years, however, there was no ball. 1942 and 1943 saw the United States observing the wartime "dimout" of lights in major cities. Still, crowds gathered in those years to ring in the new year, though with a minute of silence "followed by the ringing of chimes from sound trucks parked at the base of the tower - a harkening back to the earlier celebrations at Trinity Church, where crowds would gather to 'ring out the old, ring in the new.'"
In 1920 the original wooden ball was replaced by a 400-lb wrought-iron ball. In 1955 that ball was replaced by a 150-lb aluminum ball, which remained in place until the 1980s. For New Year's Eve 2000, the ball was redesigned by Waterford Crystal and Philips.
The 100th anniversary of that original ball drop - 2007 - saw Waterford Crystal and Philips create a new LED crystal ball that increased the brightness and color of the Ball (capitalized now, like "Bono" or "Cher."). The Centennial Ball weighs nearly six tons and is 12' in diameter featuring 2,688 Waterford Crystal triangles and 32,256 Philips Luxeon LEDs. It sits above Times Square year-round, waiting for tonight.
A "Time-Ball" drops from a flagpole at the United States Naval Observatory every day at 12pm.
Ochs and his wife, Effie Wise Ochs, had one child, a daughter whom they named Iphigene. Iphigene married Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who assumed publishing of the New York Times from August Ochs' death in 1935 until 1961. A Sulzberger has published the Times ever since.
